Although Maxine Albrecht had a career she loved as a legal secretary for more than 50 years, the real joy of her life was her grandchildren. “She was just the best grandmother; even when she and my dad were still working ... they took a vacation every summer, usually a driving vacation” with just the grandkids, daughter Karen Albrecht Nance said. “And if the child could wash their own hair, they were old enough for a road trip.”

The first trip was to Ruidoso, N.M., the next one to Washington, D.C. Albrecht and her husband would pick the destination, alternating between Ruidoso and somewhere “culturally important that they wanted us to see,” grandson Mark Sekula said. “We would all pile into the car, drive all day, stop somewhere, jump in the pool, eat dinner, do it all the next day,” he added.

He remembered his grandfather driving on the two-lane roads in Kansas and Nebraska. “He would be passing some 18-wheeler on the road and Grandma would be white-knuckled, yelling, ‘Pull back, Don, pull back!'”

Albrecht died Sunday. She was 87.

She grew up in Poth and attended business school before starting work at the prominent San Antonio law firm of Denman, Franklin and Denman, Nance said.

She met her husband in 1947 when he volunteered to mow her landlady's lawn. They got married about six months later and were together for 64 years.

Albrecht continued to work for the law firm, taking only a few years off when her two children were very young. They were cared for by a babysitter through their school years, an arrangement less common in the 1950s. But, Nance said, she was always home at 5 p.m. on the dot.

“She had an incredible work ethic,” she said, adding that her mother never missed their sporting events, did the cooking and housecleaning and created traditional Christmas celebrations. “She was older than 80 when she started letting us have the party on Christmas Day,” Nance said. “Her home was always open for family.”

Albrecht and her four sisters grew up on a farm, but they knew as much about reading and music as they did about milking cows or cleaning a chicken coop, Nance said.

Grandson Jack Albrecht remembers how smart his grandmother was. “She was always very literate about what was going on, very well-read,” he said. “She is the person who got me, as a kid, in the habit of reading the paper; of knowing who my mayor was, and because of them I research my entire ballot before I head out to vote.”